


Every Friday After the War

by ignipes



Category: Captain America (2011), The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-06
Updated: 2012-05-06
Packaged: 2017-11-04 22:48:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,134
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/399051
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ignipes/pseuds/ignipes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve Rogers, Clint Barton, and a lot of memories in the aftermath. Post-movie.</p><p>Contains spoilers for <em>The Avengers</em>. Big spoilers. Huge! Also for <em>Captain America</em>, but mostly for <em>The Avengers</em>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Every Friday After the War

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to oxoniensis for the proofreading!

A knock on the door interrupts Fury mid-sentence. He looks past Steve's shoulder and his mouth twitches in a faint grimace, but he only says, "Enter." Then, to Steve, "Excuse me, Captain."

"Of course," Steve says, and he tries not to show how relieved he is. He twists in his chair as a uniformed SHIELD agent comes into Fury's office. 

The agent glances at Steve but blinks away quickly--Steve hasn't decided yet if that reaction is better or worse than open-mouthed staring--and says to Fury, "There's a problem, sir."

Fury sits back in his chair and he doesn't quite sigh, but Steve is willing to bet he really wants to. "Should I pretend to be surprised? What is it?"

"We, uh." The agent pauses and clears his throat. He's young and round-faced and he's doing a terrible job hiding how nervous he is, and Steve fully expects the next thing out of his mouth to be _there's more aliens, sir, and this time they've got it in for the Bronx_. But what he says is, "We can't find Agent Barton."

"Is that so?" Fury asks mildly. 

The agent's face colors in two bright spots on his cheeks. "No, sir. I mean, yes, sir. He's supposed to be under observation, and there's been no perimeter breach that we can detect, but we're still looking, and he kept demanding to be told--"

"I know what he wants to know," Fury says. "Agent Jefferson, if Barton doesn't want to be found, you're sure as hell not going to find him. Go back to whatever you're supposed to be doing. I'll take care of it."

The agent leaves and shuts the door behind him, and Fury stands slowly--he's concealing injuries, refusing to wince, and Steve wonders who else can see it--and says, "I'm afraid we'll have to continue this conversation later, Captain Rogers." 

"Sure," says Steve. "I probably won't be looking forward to it."

Fury smiles, a quick thin line. "I think we can come to an agreement."

Steve is pretty sure they can't, and he's running out of polite ways to say, "Yes, in fact, I do want to do more with my time than stare at the walls waiting for an enemy to attack, but I don't trust you or your agency and I doubt I ever will." He gets the feeling Fury is running out of polite ways to ask, which means their mutually unsatisfying conversations will probably become very impolite in the near future.

But for now Steve only stands up and says, "Do you need help? Right now," he adds, at Fury's skeptical glance. Fury looks more annoyed than anything--definitely not worried enough to indicate he thinks this is a serious problem--but Steve asks anyway. "Do you think Agent Barton is dangerous?"

Fury stops with his hand on the door handle. "That depends on what you mean, Captain. Barton's a dangerous man even when he isn't being mind-controlled by an alien lunatic from another world."

"I know," Steve says. "I fought beside him." 

He's very careful not to stress the word _beside_ , but Fury clearly hears it, and there's another lightning-fast hint of a smile. Steve wonders if he practices those looks in the mirror, works on his technique to make his not-quite-smiles more menacing than reassuring. 

"But right now," Fury goes on, "I think the only problem is that he's scaring the children. It's nothing to worry about."

It isn't until Fury is gone and Steve is halfway down the hall to the elevators that he realizes that, while Fury's answer wasn't a request for help, it wasn't exactly a "no" either. 

Steve stops and turns around, looks back down the hallway to Fury's office, looks the other way toward the elevators. He knows SHIELD has underground bunkers and bases elsewhere, but here in New York the headquarters is just an office building, nondescript on the outside, large rooms and long hallways on the inside. Everything is bright and clean and there are windows on every wall; it's nothing like Steve would expect from a base of secret intelligence operations. Three times he has to ask somebody to point him in the right direction, and he gets a few curious looks, but nobody tries to stop him. Steve can't figure out if it's because they're humoring him or if they really do think he belongs, but he's not going to worry about it, not until the armed guards show up and ask him why he's poking his nose into unauthorized spaces. 

He ends up underground, on the third basement level below the surface, trying doors on a long hallway. It looks like every other hallway in the building, but emptier, disused, some of the lights burned out, most of the signs peeled off the doors. He doesn't know anything about Clint Barton, and he doesn't know much about SHIELD. But the young agent had said _under observation_ and _no perimeter breach_ , and he had said _he kept demanding to be told_ , and Fury had said _scaring the children_ , and Steve can put two and two together well enough.

Hallway down the corridor he turns onto another corridor, and halfway down that one he finds a door that isn't locked. The knob turns and the door swings inward, hits a cardboard box with a dull thud. The only light in the room comes from a panel of flickering screens against one wall; there are cables snaking between them and computers whirring quietly on the floor.

Barton is sitting in front of the bank of monitors, feet propped up on the table. He doesn't look around when Steve comes in, but he says, "Fury send you to find me?"

"I'm not really sure," Steve says. "He gave me a look and walked away. Does that count?" 

"Depends on the look," Barton says.

Steven takes that for an invitation and lets the door fall shut behind him, blocking out the hallway light. He pushes aside a few boxes of jumbled equipment and drags a chair out of the corner, turns it around and sits with his forearms on the back. 

A few of the screens are mosaics of static images, but most are playing through videos, some in clear color, some in grainy black and white, time and date counts in every corner, every one of them completely silent. They're security recordings from bases and laboratories, from offices and vaults, wherever anybody was keeping something Loki wanted to steal. Steve has seen some of it already, from before the attack, when they were trying to figure out Loki's plan, and just as it did then, it makes his skin crawl. That's one thing nobody had bothered to explain to him about waking up in the future: everywhere you go, somebody is watching. He keeps thinking he should get used to it, get past the point where it's a jolt to realize how quickly everybody in the world had seen the battle and its aftermath, but it's still unsettling, another change he can't get his head around.

What he hasn't seen yet is the footage from the airship during the attack. That's all in vivid color, chaotic and bright, fires and fights and twisted metal, people shouting and running and bleeding, all of it flashing on the screens without sound. Most of the faces are unfamiliar and all of the uniforms are the same; in each one it takes Steve a few seconds to figure out who's attacking and who's defending.

"Do you remember it?" Steve asks. 

"Some," Barton says. 

Barton's not looking at him, isn't reacting at all, but he's too still for it to be natural, his gaze too fixed on the screen in front of him. It isn't a recording of anything he did while under Loki's control; those are playing too, but on other monitors: arrows sprouting from backs and necks, sticking in walls before exploding, soldiers falling in graceless heaps. Steve thinks he could skip forward in time seven hundred years and that's one thing that would never change, the way men die in battle, sudden and surprised, people in one moment and empty sacks of blood and flesh in the next.

But Barton isn't watching any of that. What's he watching is from outside the cage, the one that was built for Dr. Banner but failed to hold anybody in the end. The angle is awkward, aimed at the door along and across the surrounding walkway. Steve doesn't know what Thor is saying, what Loki is saying, what Agent Coulson is saying before he falls, and after, when the blood was spreading over his chest, but he doesn't need to. 

"He was your friend?" he asks.

Barton's voice is quiet, the words hollow. "We worked together." 

Steve turns his head to look at Barton, rests his cheek on his arms on the back of the chair. "He was your friend," he says, not a question this time. 

For a long moment, there's no answer, then Barton exhales tiredly and reaches up to scrub one hand through his hair, rub the back of his neck, and for the first time since Steve's stepped through the door, it feels like Barton is _there_ , in the room, a solid person rather than a negative space. 

"Yeah," Barton says. "I think he was. But I didn't notice until it was too late." Barton turns his head toward Steve. He looks exhausted and tense, badly in need of a shower and about twelve hours of sleep, but his eyes are clear. "Are you going to tell me it's not my fault?" He gestures toward the monitors without looking at them. "That he would have done all this even if he'd grabbed somebody else?"

Steve meets Barton's eyes. "No. I'm not. I know it doesn't help to hear that, even if it is true."

"You're right. It doesn't."

"Somebody very smart once told me," Steve begins. But he has to stop, take a breath and let it out. For just a moment he can smell the smoke and dust drifting through London's burned-out ruins, hear the all-clear sirens and the crunch of Peggy's shoes on the rubble, feel the touch of her hand, warm and fleeting on his arm. "She told me that when--when soldiers die in war, I shouldn't let my guilt make me forget why they were there. Don't take away the dignity of--" He pauses again, clears his throat. "The dignity of their choice, that's what she said. Their choice to be there, in the fight, for something they believed was worth fighting for." 

Barton doesn't say anything. 

"That doesn't help either," Steve says. "Not yet, anyway. Maybe it will someday. She's been dead for years, but I keep thinking, I wish I could ask her if--if there was somebody around to say that same thing to her, after, even when it was the last thing she wanted to hear. If it helped."

Barton drops his feet to the floor and sits forward, rests his elbows on his knees and looks down, his face tucked into the shadows. When he looks up again, he shakes his head slightly, and there's a quirk to his lips that isn't quite a smile. 

"You know why you were Phil's hero?" he says. 

"I, uh..." Whatever Steve was expecting him to say, that wasn't it. He feels his face grow hot and a familiar, uncomfortable knot form in his stomach. "No? Why?" 

"I asked him once," Barton says. "Well, I say asked, but really I was just looking for a reason to give him shit. It was one of my first missions with SHIELD. I thought they'd stuck him with me because nobody else wanted the job." Barton gives Steve a quick look. "Apparently I'm difficult to work with. We were in this shithole eastern Soviet mining town, middle of fucking nowhere in Siberia, looking for information about North Korean labor camps--uh, there are two Koreas now, and neither of them are occupied by Japan, but that happened after the war, so I guess you..."

"Yes. There is a lot that's changed," Steve says, in the same patient tone of voice he's been using since he woke up. "But one of the agents showed me how to use the internet. I'm sure I'll catch up eventually."

Barton's crooked smile is real this time. "Right. Sorry. Anyway, we were stuck in this town, nothing to do but try not to freeze and try not to get caught, so I was asking. Phil is--he was a pretty cynical guy, usually. Idealists don't last very long in our line of work." Barton's voice is hoarse, dry, and Steve wonders how long he had been answering questions from suspicious agents and accusing colleagues before he escaped to hide in a dark room in the basement, surrounded by blood and destruction and evidence of a guilt he would carry whether he deserved it or not. 

A few seconds pass before he goes on. "But he said that most of what everybody knows about Captain America, from the history books and stories and what kids learn in school, I guess, I never really went to school, he said it's all juvenile fucking bullshit--his exact words--because most people only want to believe in a certain kind of hero. And that's all they need, that story. But the ones who are left over, the ones who need more than that, they need to know that the first thing Cap--the first thing _you_ did on the front lines was go off on a harebrained mission against orders with almost no chance of succeeding. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred anybody tries that, they don't end up a hero who saves a lot of lives. They just end up another dead stupid fuck nobody remembers." Barton looks at Steve and shrugs. "His words, not mine."

"I didn't do it to save a lot of men," Steve says. He's learned, since he woke up, that it's often easier not to argue with what everybody thinks they know about him, however much their small lies chafe. But he knows this is a strange, fragile thing, this quiet room and these memories and the respect of a dead man who believed that people could be good, and sometimes the lies aren't so small. "I did it to save one man. I don't know what I would have done if it had been any other unit."

"Yeah," Barton says. "Exactly." 

On the monitor the medics are pushing Fury out of the way, shouting for help, but it's too late. "I would have liked to have known him better," Steve says.

Barton turns away, like he's embarrassed to have said anything, and angry, but too exhausted to do anything about it. He sits back in his chair and he's looking up at the screens again. Steve doubts he's seeing anything that isn't already fixed in his memory.

There is a part of Steve that still wakes up every morning expecting to find himself on a flimsy cot in a muddy tent, damp socks draped over worn boots on the floor, quiet voices carrying through the canvas as the camp wakes up. That part of him wants to order Barton to get some sleep, grab what rest he can, while he can, because there will always be another battle, another loss, another handful of names people will start to say, then stop themselves when they remember who won't be standing in line next time out, who've been reduced to memories and half-formed sentences stuck in the throat.

But Barton already knows all of that, and Steve doesn't give orders here and now, to people who have been fighting for longer than he ever did, in a world where the lines are much harder to draw. What he thinks every morning after he remembers where he is, and when, is that those years of war that felt endless to him were barely a blink in history, the space between one heartbeat and another. He feels stupid for not having realized sooner that when they told him, "We're making you better so you can win the war," what they meant was, "There will always be more wars."

Steve tilts his chair back on two legs, lets them thump down again. "I used to be really good at breaking into secure bases," he says.

Barton looks at him, one eyebrow raised. "Okay?"

"I never had to break out of one," Steve says. "At least not one that wasn't already exploding or falling apart. And I have to admit that it's a little bit unnerving how many cameras there are everywhere these days. But I'm willing to give it a shot."

"You can leave any time you want," Barton says. "And I don't need help getting out of here."

"No, but you do need dinner," _and to get out of this room, away from this place, if only for a little while_ , "and I need an excuse to ask you about why the heck you use a bow and arrow." He stands up and keeps talking when Barton opens his mouth to reply. "I can think of a lot of a reasons, but none of them are very good reasons, not even my current working theory about how many times you must have watched _The Adventures of Robin Hood_ as a kid." Steve turns toward the door, stops. "Does anybody even remember that movie? Do people still watch old movies?" 

For a second Barton just stares at him, then he leans forward, hits a few keys on the keyboard. One by one the screens blink to show the SHIELD logo on a pale blue background. 

"Yeah, they do," Barton says. "Double feature with _Captain Blood_ at this old theater. We had to sneak in."

Steve doesn't know who the _we_ is in Barton's past, doesn't think he'll get an answer if he asks, so he only says, "So did we." It doesn't hurt as much as it could.

Barton rolls to his feet, more steadily than Steve would have expected. "The security in this place is easy to avoid," he says. "Meet me two floors up, end of the western hallway. Take the stairs. I hope you like Thai."

"Two floors up, western hallway," Steve says. "Thai what?"

"Food," Barton says. "Fury will send Natasha to find me once he realizes I've left the building, and it's her turn to pick the restaurant."

Then he opens the door and he's gone. Steve waits three seconds, no longer, but when he steps into the corridor, it's already empty. He walks toward the stairwell without once looking up at the cameras that follow his every step.


End file.
